Amatorski

Amatorski took their name from the Polish for amateurish, and they meant it: this Ghent band records on purpose in low fidelity, letting tape hiss and blur soften the edges of a slow, melancholy post-rock built around Inne Eysermans' voice, with Sebastiaan Van den Branden and Christophe Claeys at the heart of the group and Hilke Ros also in the ranks. Their songs tend to tell stories, and they got their big break in 2010, when they made the final of Humo's Rock Rally.

"Come home", from that year's EP Same Stars We Shared, is the one that carried them further. Eysermans wrote it after reading the love letters her grandmother wrote during World War II, and you can hear the weight of those old pages in it: a hushed, aching song that builds tension out of restraint and lets the silence do half the work. Belgians came to know it from advertising for Spa Reine water.

In 2011 they went to London to make their debut album, TBC, with producer Darren Allison, whose credits run through Spiritualized, the Divine Comedy and Belle & Sebastian. Critics loved it, it climbed to number 5 on the Belgian album chart, and it picked up nominations at the Belgian Music Industry Awards. Reviewers kept reaching for Portishead as a point of comparison.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.